Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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58 of 65 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Work of Art Ruined By The Worst Software Ever Written, November 21, 2004
From a hardware perspective, it's a work of art. Beautiful, sleek, lightweight, and solid feeling. I got it in my hands and fell in love. And then I tried to use it. Which required installing SonicStage. I'd read all the bad reviews of SonicStage, and I'd used (what I thought was) equally bad Sony software in the past -- OpenMG for their NetMD player, for example. So I was prepared for some annoyances, fine tuning, maybe occassional bugs. I also assumed the people who complained were exaggerating about how bad it was. LET ME PROMISE YOU -- THEY WERE NOT. In almost twenty years of using computer software, tinkering with electronics, owning some version of almost every gadget known to man -- I have never seen such a promising piece of hardware CRIPPLED by such a buggy, ill-conceived, underpowered, unintuitive piece of software. It's WORSE than what people are telling you. It's so bad that I ended up returning mine and buying an Ipod -- something I swore I'd never do. The user interface isn't even consistent between the player and the software. There's no way to shuffle all the songs on the drive. User support is non-existent. SonicStage freezes and crashes for no reason, despite being upgraded to latest version and uninstalled/reinstalled. Certain songs won't transfer, others are marked as having no digital rights (even though they were tracks recorded from the same albums as other songs that transferred fine -- and that NEVER had digital rights assigned to them in the first place.) A lot of people have complained about Sony forcing you to use their proprietary ATRAC3 format instead of MP3. Honestly -- that's the LEAST of this unit's problems. The bigger problem is that the software engineers are too incompetent to program a stable program that will actually CONVERT and MANAGE those ATRAC3's. Sony's hardware engineers created this beautiful player, and their software engineers will be the cause of its failure. Words cannot do justice to how badly Sony bungled this mess. It kills me to say this, but don't waste your time.
**NEW ADDITION: To the reviewers who make comments to the effect that anyone who has problems with SonicStage software either has a faulty computer or is a complete idiot: Have you actually tried to USE the software? Or do you just sort of sit and stare at the pretty pictures on the screen? (I mean, come on. Nobody's arguing that the hardware is extremely impressive, but the software is buggy, unintuitive, and inconsistent. It's been pretty well documented by several thousand people. I can't imagine that anyone outside of the programming group that put that mess together would actually think it's a competent piece of software, and if they do, they must enjoy spending hours in front of their computer and not have much of a social life.) Second, some reviewers have disputed my claim that the unit cannot shuffle the entire HD. My claim is true, it has been substantiated by a senior marketing representative from Sony with whom I have exchanged several letters and phone calls. Yes, you can shuffle within albums (or "groups"), and you can shuffle within artists and playlists. But you CANNOT shuffle through the entire HD as a whole. The only way this would be possible would be to designate the entire library as a single playlist, and playlists are currently limited to 1000 tracks. So if you have 3,000 tracks on the player, there is absolutely, positively no way to shuffle those 3,000 tracks -- only subsets of those tracks (e.g., album, group, etc.) I suppose you could spend several extra hours of your life creating complicated playlists and shuffle between those playlists. But on an Ipod (and, incidentally, almost every other MP3 player on the market), you simply hit a menu entry titled "shuffle."
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52 of 60 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
An extremely well built MP3 player, August 28, 2004
I will keep this very simple and list the pro's and the con's of this unit so you can see what I liked about it and what I did not. For reference, my last MP3 player was a Jukebox Zen 20gig USB 2.0 version but the hard drive died so I purchased this sony.
Let me get the bad out of the way first:
-No remote included in the box (for 400, there really should be one)
-Converstion of MP3s to Atrac takes a long time if you have more than 1 gig of music...but...(see the good below)
-No "on the go" playlists. That is my biggest gripe with the unit as far as operations and functions go. There is a bookmark feature that lets you remember up to 100 of your favorite songs so you can make a bogus playlist of sorts, but coming from a Zen, the playlist feature is dearly missed
-The case included cannot be hanged anywhere. It simply protects the player from scratches but has no belt clip/string/rope.
-Cheapo headphones in the box but that's expected.
Now the good...
-Visually, this unit is simply stunning. Pictures do not do it justice. It actually looks like a 400 dollar piece of technology.
-While Atrac conversion is slow, it could not be more simple. A transfer wizard asks you to select the songs you want to move to the player, and then converts them ON THE FLY without making a copy of the file in Atrac on your computer. It's great because if you have a lot of music, you can simply leave the player on overnight and everything will be done when you get up.
-The player sounds very good. I can say that I found the quality to be much better than my Zen, and the Zens are known for their awesome sound quality.
-64 kbps Atrac compression sounds pretty much as good as a 128 kbps MP3 compression.
-Menus are very simple to navigate and there are only 2 buttons on this unit not counting the standard >>, <<,play/stop buttons. All of them are used to good effect.
-The equalizer on this thing is stunning. On my Zen, I always turned it off because I could not hear a difference. Here, the unit actually sounds better depending on what settings you like.
-Battery life is stellar. Not exactly 30 but close.
-Creating playlists using the Sony software is VERY easy. Type in a name, drag and drop files either on the player already or in your computer.
I could probably go on like this for a while because this unit has tons of little things that make me just love it. For all the bad rep NW-HD1 got for the Atrac format, it really delivered in terms of audio quality, ease of use, portability, and visuals. If you like solid construction units that are reliable (it really looks reliable despite the 90 day labor, 1 year parts warranty) and have 400 dollars to spend. I would get this over the iPod anyday.
As a sidenote, the unit IS smaller than an iPod. It is about the size of the iPod mini.
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27 of 32 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Style Wars, October 14, 2004
I think whether or not you like the Sony comes down to a taste in style. I do not have any MP3 files on my computer, so I don't care about the lack of native MP3 support or converting CD's to ATRAC. The ATRACplus format sounds awesome and is better than Apple's AAC format because you can store more songs in a smaller space (that is, the Sony unit is smaller than the Apple 40GB unit). The 40GB iPod stores 10,000 songs in AAC format (or probably less in MP3 format). This Sony 20GB unit stores 10,000 songs in ATRAC3plus 64kbps format. These formats are basically equivalent to each other in terms of sonic quality, except that Sony allows for greater size compression. People complain about the SonicStage software and I will admit that it is not the best, but it also only took me 5 minutes to figure out without looking at the documentation. The battery life difference is not even a contest as the Sony goes for 27 hours while the iPod only goes for 12 hours.
I could have gone either way on the iPod vs Sony debate as I think both units are really nice. The Sony is just as easy to use as the iPod (admittedly, I am not as knocked out by that wheel as other people are). I am glad I got the Sony and recommend it to others.
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